Should America Buy Greenland?

Here's how it could happen

I never took the “buy Greenland” stuff seriously. Yet Trump may have been more earnest than most people think. After tweeting about the possibility in 2019 and being rebuffed by the Danish Prime Minister, he took the step of abruptly cancelling a planned trip to Copenhagen. Trump has recently reiterated his wish to buy the territory, and Don Jr. just made a surprise trip there this week.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that this should be a major priority of the Trump administration and that it’s not exactly impossible. My estimation of this eventually happening has gone from under 1% to maybe 2%, over say a thirty-year time horizon. But that crosses the threshold to be high enough for the possibility to be worth considering as a thought experiment. And at this rate of increase it’ll be a sure thing by next month anyway.

Denmark gained control over Greenland in the early eighteenth century when missionaries and traders from Denmark-Norway established a presence on the island, seeking to convert the Inuit population to Christianity and integrate the territory into their trade network. It eventually officially became a Danish colony in 1814 after the dissolution of the Danish-Norwegian union at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1979, Greenland was granted home rule, and in 2009, it gained greater autonomy while remaining part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with control over most internal affairs but relying on Denmark for defense and foreign policy.

Greenland is a sparsely populated land with about 57,000 people. About 10% are Europeans and the rest are natives. Its GDP per capita is $57,000 per year, which is not bad at all by global standards but significantly worse off than the rest of Denmark. Yet its standard of living is highly subsidized. Approximately 20% of Greenland’s GDP, or half of its government budget, comes from the Danish government. The territory has been said to be on a slow roll towards independence, but it’s hard to imagine what that would look like given its complete economic reliance on the home country.

The small population is due in part to its unforgiving geography. About 80% of Greenland is covered by a literal block of ice called the Greenland Ice Sheet, which is 1.7 million square miles, and over two miles deep at its thickest points.

Greenlanders don’t appear particularly attached to Denmark to begin with, with the Prime Minister of the territory recently declaring that they should form their own nation, and polls showing majority support for that position. However, they seem to be a practical people. In 2017, 78% of Greenlanders said they would oppose independence if it meant a fall in living standards. So they want to be their own country, but not the responsibilities that would entail. In the end, being part of the United States, the most powerful empire in the history of the world where all races are equally welcome, may start to look like a much more enticing prospect than being ruled as a welfare dependent of a tiny and not particularly distinguished European country. Greenlanders seem pretty lethargic and easily malleable, desiring independence but not enough to want to do much to gain it, and becoming Americans could perhaps provide some excitement to what seem like very boring lives.

I have to say that emotionally, I like the idea. Americans are living well but pessimistic about their politics. The things that voters care about are mostly silly. Immigrants do not commit much crime and are not reducing your standard of living, but improving it. When Kamala pivoted away from wokeness, she had no message other than being nice to people and reducing the price of insulin. This is more sympathetic than Republicans’ hate filled politics, but too small to inspire anyone.

If America has problems, it is still morally and culturally superior to the rest of the world. Its destiny is to dissolve borders and distinct cultures, which are annoying and stupid. We do this by welcoming the world here and making it more like us abroad. Most of this is done without any planning. American pop culture and economic dynamism are magnets for Elite Human Capital all over the world, whether they move here or stay home and simply find our society much more exciting than their own.

There is bound to be a great deal of heartache and destruction in the process. But there is no such thing as the preservation of cultures or nations in the modern world. It’s like a person who gives up on self-improvement and decides he’s going to do whatever it takes to keep his life just as it is now. This is impossible to do and still maintain the kind of existence that makes one human. You grow older, people in your life die, new opportunities arise that must be seized if you are to maintain any will to live at all. If you do sink into the same routine, the result will be a stupefied state of existence. Anything that is worth doing like starting a family or achieving professional fulfillment requires constant change.

This is even truer for a nation, where much more coercion and hostility to progress is required to try and keep things as they have always been. “The past is a foreign country.” Go back and watch American TV from the 1950s, and compare it to shows from some third world country today. Your values are probably more similar to those of your same age on the other side of the world than they are to those of your great grandparents. Only in the most backwards parts of the world is this not true. American culture will change again over the next few decades, and the question is whether the process will be directed by those who are optimistic, open, and accepting of what technological and economic progress brings or those who would bitterly resist all of that in the name of the vision of a stability that cannot possibly exist.

America instinctually gets this more than any other nation. The Amish couldn’t exist in Europe. You can’t even homeschool your own kids in France or Germany. Elon Musk couldn’t exist there either. America is almost across the board more willing to choose freedom over life itself, though our retrograde euthanasia laws remain an embarrassment. Recently I saw a banner ad in a medical building for an anti-aging clinic, that all but invited you to go to a doctor and make up some symptoms so you can get yourself pumped with testosterone and continue building your biceps deep into middle age. It looked like a commercial for a sports show, with an older fit Asian guy in a tight shirt staring off into the distance. We let the drug companies buy minute long ads featuring multiracial picnics during football games telling us what pills we should badger our doctors for, and we can get booked for an appointment that same day to try whatever it was they convinced us to take. Practically every other country except New Zealand bans direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Here, instead of central planning, the consumer is king, and information flows through markets and price signals, no matter how corrupted they are by government interference in the health care sector.

The best reason to annex Greenland then is that it will be a win for America and a loss for Europe. Perhaps not in a real material sense. The 57,000 Greenlanders largely dependent on welfare aren’t exactly a human capital bounty worth fighting for. But men love looking at maps. America’s land mass would increase by 20% overnight. On some 2D maps, Greenland looks bigger than Africa. Little boys like my sons will grow up feeling in their bones that America is big and Europe is small. This is why everyone fears Russia, even though it is weak. It has 11 time zones, and I’m convinced that this has distorted that nation’s psychological profile, making its leaders believe that it is entitled to more of a say in the global system than its levels of objective strength and economic development entitle it to.

We can figure out what to do with Greenland later. Let some connected tech guys lease the land from the federal government and see what they come up with. If there are any resources that are worth extracting given the costs involved, American companies are much more likely to figure out how to do so than Europeans, and not be hampered by labor laws or overly burdensome environmental regulations. The general idea would be to buy off the Eskimos and then try to use the land as a laboratory to try new things.

Denmark in effect pays Greenland to remain part of the nation. But America’s GDP is 70 times larger. We can win any bidding war. To put things in perspective, Elon Musk is personally worth more than Denmark’s entire yearly GDP. He’s already posting about the acquisition of Greenland, and remember this is how buying Twitter started.

The existence of Danish rule over Greenland is an absurdity to begin with. A Nordic country pays around 50,000 Eskimos to be their friends, and they haven’t even won their hearts and minds. Why exactly? There’s no good reason, financial, cultural, or geopolitical, for this. The Danes are committed to the union simply because it already exists. Their King just changed the coat of arms to give more prominence to the polar bear and ram, providing the tiny population of Greenland as much representation on it as the rest of Denmark. It is thought that the new design might be a response to what Trump has been saying in recent years, which if true would once again show that Europeans do not have cultural autonomy and are just reacting to the US news cycle. If they’re not responding to Trump and wanted to do this anyway, it’s even more bizarre, indicating an emotional commitment to a tiny ungrateful population that is completely dependent on them. An attachment to the status quo for its own sake is offensive to American sensibilities, and Trump must have sensed that when he began talking about the territory becoming American instead.

The new administration could start by making a generous offer to the Danes. Nations are often stubborn about national territory, so it might well be refused. At that point, you can try to buy the loyalty of the people directly. We could pay every resident of Greenland $100,000, and it would only cost $5.7 billion, about 5% of what we spend on food stamps per year. This would be hard to facilitate, but one could imagine propaganda campaigns aimed at the population, including the buying of local major figures and influencers, and an X algorithm that seems like it has been suspiciously tweaked to push pro-America propaganda to Eskimo users. MAGA Eskimo rap groups then pop up modeled on the Forgaito Blow phenomenon. There are already fat pro-Trump Inuits who look like every Latinos for Trump rapper.

Having Musk’s involvement would add to the propaganda value of the coup. Europeans would never let a private citizen get powerful enough to impact the outcome of elections, much less undertake a massive geopolitical project. Our willingness to let individuals acquire ungodly amounts of wealth in the first place and on top of that use it to influence the political system are two more unique features of our society compared to the rest of the developed world. Europeans don’t respect political speech any more than the right of drug companies to convince you to try to defy aging. See the heavy restrictions they place on campaign advertising.

One could imagine a two-front attack. The US continually pressures Denmark to give up Greenland. At the same time, there is a campaign to sell the inhabitants on the idea that their destiny is to join America, which is much wealthier and more glamorous. The Greenlanders call their current rulers white colonizers as Trump explains that they are getting ripped off. The Danes feel the heat from both sides. Eventually, they are given a face-saving way out of the dilemma, and allow for a referendum in Greenland to decide whether it wants independence. Annexation soon follows.

There shouldn’t be a hint of using the military to pressure the Danes. This is one line we must not cross in order to maintain the moral high ground. But using money and PR to buy a new territory in a deal that makes sense for all involved is in the end consistent with neoliberal values. And if the pro-annexation propaganda doesn’t work, it’s a result we will just have to live with.

You may say I’m a dreamer. But is this crazier than Donald Trump becoming president? If there’s one thing the last few years have taught us, it’s that reality can be a lot more hilarious than we once believed possible, and many of the events that have made life more fun have been the direct result of Donald Trump and Elon Musk using their outsized voices and money to undertake projects that no one else would be bold enough to undertake.

I’m not a MAGA, so I’m not going to pretend that this has much of a chance of happening. But even if we don’t end up buying Greenland, the meme itself can help serve as a reminder that in the end, everyone has to become an American. There is no other way forward.